In Digging Deep for Accusations, Candidates for Attorney General Miss Some Details

By SEWELL CHAN

Published: October 16, 2006

The candidates for state attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo and Jeanine F. Pirro, exchanged volleys of accusations and rebuttals yesterday in the first of two scheduled debates, and some of the statements made by both sides were exaggerated, incomplete or simply wrong.

The gaffes occurred as each candidate attacked the other's record and performance: Ms. Pirro's as the Westchester County district attorney from 1994 to 2005, and Mr. Cuomo's as the federal housing secretary from 1997 to 2001.

Assailing Mr. Cuomo's record at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ms. Pirro repeatedly referred to an independent report issued in 2002 that was critical of his performance.

Ms. Pirro told him: ''The Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights that said that your record was dismal -- they said that you were a disappointment to them -- is made up of Democrats: Evan Bayh, and other individuals, Eleanor Norton Holmes, who talked about the fact that what you did at HUD was allow corruption to go on, as well as your allowing the use of illegal pesticides in low-income housing where children are living.''

The assertion contained several errors. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana is not a member of the commission; his father, Birch Bayh, a former senator, is. Ms. Pirro was referring to Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's delegate to Congress. The commission is nonpartisan and has several Republican members.

In the 2002 report, the commission stated, ''The high expectations that Cuomo's arrival at the agency generated among fair housing advocates have ended in frustration and disappointment.'' It found that ''Cuomo has had some important victories,'' but noted a decline in efficiency and productivity and ''an exodus of high-level personnel who have chafed under the demands of Cuomo's highly politicized regime.''

The report did not accuse Mr. Cuomo of condoning corruption, nor did it mention the claim about pesticides, which stems from a federal lawsuit.

Later in the debate, Mr. Cuomo said, ''I brought 2,000 cases against discrimination when I was at HUD.'' But the same report called the department's enforcement of fair-housing laws ''dismal'' and said the number of actions had declined, in relative terms, since 1997.

Mr. Cuomo made at least one significant error when he said, referring to Ms. Pirro, ''There is a candidate who is being accused of criminal wrongdoing and is under investigation by a number of law enforcement agencies and has their ethics questioned.''

Prosecutors are investigating whether Ms. Pirro illegally recorded her husband's conversations last year in an attempt to learn whether he was having an affair, but she has not been formally accused of anything.

Ms. Pirro was asked about her office's handling of the case of Jeffrey Mark Deskovic, who was convicted in 1990 of raping and killing a high school classmate. Last month, Mr. Deskovic was exonerated and released from prison after a new test of DNA evidence this year linked the crime to another man.

Ms. Pirro said, ''There was no new evidence during the time I was the D.A.'' In fact, however, Mr. Deskovic was freed not because of new evidence but because of a new test -- using a technique not available in 1990 -- of old evidence.

Barry C. Scheck, a co-director of the Innocence Project, which worked on the case, said the new test was identical to one that Mr. Deskovic sought, twice, in petitions filed in 2000 to a federal appellate court. Ms. Pirro's office argued then that Mr. Deskovic had lost his right to an appeal when one of his lawyers missed a filing deadline.

Asked why she did not support a new DNA test for Mr. Deskovic in 2000, Ms. Pirro said yesterday, ''The running of that information against the database would not have been possible at that time.''

But Mr. Scheck noted that in 2000, the law providing for that database, a state compendium of DNA samples from convicted felons, had already been enacted and that the database was all but complete. ''If Pirro had agreed to retest the evidence from the victim and put the DNA profile into the database back in 2000, it would have matched the real murderer and Deskovic would have been freed years earlier,'' he said.

Discussing Ms. Pirro's often-touted efforts against pedophiles who use the Internet, Mr. Cuomo cited a recent article in The New York Times that noted that 93 percent of such cases in Westchester County resulted in some form of probation, even though Ms. Pirro noted in news releases that the crime of attempting to disseminate indecent material to a minor is punishable by up to four years in prison.

Mr. Cuomo said the article showed that Ms. Pirro's record ''failed compared to Nassau and Brooklyn and Manhattan.'' While the article cited figures indicating that prosecutors in those jurisdictions were less likely than Ms. Pirro to bargain with defendants charged with trying to sexually entice minors using the Internet, it also noted that each of those offices had brought fewer such cases than Ms. Pirro had.